Location: In a dimension known as the Twilight Zone...do de doo doo, do de doo doo...

Posts: 19,268

Local Time: 06:59 PM

Oh, here we go again...

Quote:

Originally Posted by anitram

Within Hollywood, Eastwood has a ton of clout. He's influential in ways that other Republican celebrities, like Jon Voigt are not because nobody cares about them or their opinions. Clint is a star which is why he was there.

Which is funny, 'cause I thought the GOP hated it when celebrity culture intervened in politics.

Posting a gif of Eastwood making a WTF face from one of his movies is hardly mocking some random 82-year-old. And if it turned out he was suffering dementia or something, I'd certainly be sad about that. But from what I understand, he was ad-libbing much of it, which just did not come across well at all. But at least I'm relieved that no one got paid to write that. Because it was some serious wtf-erry.

I'm perfectly happy to mock whoever thought it was a good idea to bring out a guy who supports same-sex marriage and a few other things that cause such conservative pearl-clutching as a surprise speaker to rally the crowd .... and apparently also thought it was a fine idea to let him wing it.

As the Republican convention fades into oblivion, the one thing everybody is still talking about is, of course, the party platform.

Honest. You should see the tweets.

The convention was so full of opportunities to catch a glimpse of celebrities like John Sununu and Rudy Giuliani that I didn’t get around to the platform until the flight back from Tampa. But it was so worth the wait. Really, I could hardly take my eyes away from it long enough to watch the flight attendant demonstrate how to use a seat buckle.

As you’d expect, there were paeans to things Republicans like (phonics, Israel, coal, English, defense spending, transparency for everything except political donations) and denunciations of the stuff they hate (Obamacare, mass transit, the Law of the Sea Treaty, Venezuela, teachers’ unions, Obamacare). But you may be interested to know that the proven methods of improving school performance are high standards, accountability and “renewed focus on the Constitution and the writings of the Founding Fathers.”

Some of the recommendations are stunning. Besides the inevitable tribute to the Second Amendment, the platform goes to the trouble of specifically mentioning that Republicans are against limiting the sale of those extra-bullet magazines for guns that maximized the victim count in the mass shootings in Tucson, Colorado and Wisconsin.

But the most startling sentence is in the preamble, where the Republicans announce they are the party with “a positive, optimistic view of an opportunity society where any American who works hard, dreams big and follows the rules can achieve anything he or she wants.”

People, do you think the Republican hierarchy really believes that working hard and playing by the rules is a guarantee of big-dream fulfillment? This is a worldview you usually only hear before the first elimination round on “American Idol.”

No wonder they don’t like food stamps and unemployment compensation.

The platform provides some welcome hints about what the Romney ticket stands for. We do need help on that point because when it comes to actual plans, Romney-Ryan has been pretty opaque.

Leaving Tampa, we knew no more about the big Medicare issue than when we arrived. The biggest Republican talking point is that the Obama health care reform will, in the words of Mitt Romney, “hurt today’s seniors.” That’s all about the $716 billion in projected long-term savings, except that Ryan had the same cut in his budget plans and what the heck are we supposed to make of that?

Fortunately, Fortune magazine asked the House majority leader, Eric Cantor, that question during the convention, and Cantor was able to clear it all up thusly: “The assumption was that, um, the, the, ah, again — I probably can’t speak to that in an exact way, so I better just not.”

So, O.K.

The big, if-not-quite-articulated, message in Tampa was that in a free economy, everybody will get what they deserve. There is no need to worry about the vast, growing gap between the richest and the rest, or the shrinking middle class, or the fact that America currently has one of the worst rates of social mobility in the developed world.

Untrammeled, the business sector will create plenty of jobs, and the hard-working big-dreamers will jump in, amass wealth and achieve success. You cut taxes, reduce regulation and let the magic happen. It’s that or what Paul Ryan called “a dull adventureless journey from one entitlement to the next, a government-planned life, a country where everything is free but us.”

Listening to the convention speeches, it was easy to get the impression that every high-ranking Republican in the country had parents who were truck drivers or convenience store workers who moved up entirely through their own efforts. Also, there were a lot of grandfathers who worked in the mines. Republicans love mines, particularly coal mines. This is partly because of their big donors, but the fact that environmentalists hate coal makes coal mines even more adorable.

And the miners themselves are always sympathetic figures because they work hard and play by the rules. As a result, their biggest dreams have been realized, and they are able to spend their lives underground developing chronic pulmonary disease.

Shortly before the convention, Mitt Romney had pressed the coal theme with an appearance in Ohio, where he stood with a group of sooty miners whose sad, solemn faces seemed to underscore their concern about big government. Also, some of them later told the news media that they had been required to show up and weren’t paid for the day.

The reward will undoubtedly arrive at a later date.

I come from coal miners, so I had a particular bit of distaste for this.

Beyond this article, I don't like either party much, but my contempt for the Republican party (not necessarily individual Republicans--many of whom I like very much) runs miles deeper.
I don't share many values with them at all. I don't believe the Democrats, but at least I like their talk better.

One could also argue that he won because he was more charismatic. I'm looking at only one factor, and based on that I think the more charismatic candidate has won every time since the dawn of the age of television. Granted Bush 1 and Dukakis might be somewhat debatable, but still I recall Dukakis as an utter nerd.